


And It's the True Believers That Crash and Burn

by thefarofixer



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 06:03:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18046898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefarofixer/pseuds/thefarofixer
Summary: “You ever wonder what’d be like if we just...stopped?” Dean asks. He’s staring into the distance of the room, eyes unfocused as if seeing something that’s not there.“Stopped what?” Castiel asks.





	And It's the True Believers That Crash and Burn

**Author's Note:**

> my contribution for the Glory! Castiel Anniversary Zine

Contrary to popular belief, in the beginning for the angels there was only light and it was the darkness that came later to define them. 

There was light, there was light and there was burning beyond body, beyond thought, beyond senses, beyond the beyond ever expanding. All light was one, encompassing to the end of time and space and back again. And then all at once the darkness came, the shade, the relief. And there were shadows walking amongst them, creating their boundaries that defined and cradled and hemmed them in, that gave the angels depth and substance and power. It was the darkness that gave Heaven its shape. 

Earth came later, and both it and the humans it housed were generally seen as something of an experiment by the others in the garrison that the angel Castiel belonged to. Some viewed it with a gentle indulgence, some a necessary chore, others with open disgust. Castiel viewed it with a vague fascination as he would anything that God created but he knew his place and his orders, and for eons they kept him at a distance that made humanity seem more like a piece of art seen from across a gallery than anything tangible. 

When Castiel is assigned to pull Dean from Hell he is honored. He thinks that this is what he has been waiting for his entire existence, that this is what he was made for. He thinks it shows his strength of character, his unwavering devotion to God. 

It’s not until later that he realizes he was chosen despite those things. That they had picked him because they saw him as naive and weak. Malleable. Disposable. And most importantly compliant. 

Castiel chooses not to tell Dean of how it had burned to save him, how touching Dean’s soul didn’t just leave a mark on Dean’s human body once he returned to it but left its mark on Castiel’s Grace as well. And oh how that soul was blinding even tarnished by pain. He did not tell Dean that even once his human body had been remade and healed later and the handprint long gone each of them were still branded on a level that no human could see, both on Soul and on Grace. Sometimes he wondered if Dean could feel it still, wondered if he had ever been able to feel it or if Cas is the only one to carry that particular burden. 

He hadn’t asked about it at the time and now it feels like maybe it’s too late to bring up. It’s not very often they talk about the more metaphysical natures of their beings if it doesn’t relate to something practical and for a long time Castiel had believed genuinely that he knew all he needed to know about humans. He thinks maybe he had been as naive as his superiors had believed. 

In the beginning of his assignment he only spent time with Dean when necessary. It made sense to foster a slight connection between the two of them since Dean was recalcitrant at best and outright rebellious at worst, and getting him on board with his destiny meant that Castiel had to work at earning his trust. But that didn’t mean he needed to be with Dean all the time. In fact Castiel knew that getting too close was considered unprofessional even if it was not technically forbidden. 

And then things changed. 

As his assignment became more involved, more desperate, he began to spend more time with Dean, with Sam, with _humans_. He began to see things in a different light than the one filtering down through the shadows of Heaven. Human souls are so bright when they are filled with righteousness, with love, and Castiel cannot help but be drawn in by it. 

Castiel does not regret the burning of this new light. 

He _doesn’t._

It takes a while after his rebellion, after his complete surrender to the cause of his humans that Cas realizes that he has started to think in human. American English, to be precise. It’s not all the time, and it’s mostly not consciously, but it has begun to creep in around the edges when he’s not paying attention. When he’s relaxed with his humans in a bunker, a car, or a crappy motel room. Sometimes when he thinks of himself he thinks not of his Enochian name, or even of its human match _Castiel_ , but reflexively identifies himself as _Cas_. 

A name not given to him by God, but by a _human_. 

Sometimes, blasphemously, he thinks that maybe this must be what God wanted for him. These flawed humans. This rebellious cause. This casual nickname, first borne of laziness and disrespect, eventually turned into easy affection, belonging, comfort. 

Heaven never had warmth like this, not from its light nor its long shadows. 

It used to be that Castiel found his human vessel constrictive, claustrophobic, and nothing more than a necessarily trial to do his heavenly duty. It’s beginning to feel...different. He once overheard two humans talking, one complaining about how it was too hot out for them to sleep with a blanket on top of them, but that they had trouble sleeping without it. “I need the comforting weight of it,” they’d said. At the time Cas hadn’t understood what they’d meant. He thinks he does now though. 

He is still an angel. Technically. He still has his Grace, or he has it again, however the logistics of dying over and over, and losing his powers and becoming human then becoming angelic again work out. Dean told him once that no matter what he’d still be an angel in Dean’s eyes because he was such a stick-in-the-mud. It should have felt insulting, but Cas knew what Dean meant, what he’d been trying to say, about Castiel’s essence, about the history of his being, no matter his current state. He’s grateful for those moments of insight from Dean, as much as Dean loathes to admit he has them. 

These days Cas himself no longer feels like his existence might span an untold number of millenia into the future, and he no longer regards his potential death as something glorious and worthy and fated by God. Death is death is death, and it may not have become permanent for him yet, but it will, eventually, and he thinks maybe his death will be as random and as pointless as all the others he’s seen. 

Which somehow brings him from the endless eternal light before Time itself began to a warm kitchen hidden in an underground bunker. Instead of sitting on high or setting Fate’s wheels, here Cas sits, patiently drinking cheap beer with a flawed, perfect human, rambling on about something or other while Cas reflects how short a time it has been, in the grand scheme of things, since he met a human soul in hell and his whole universe changed. 

“Could you repeat that last part?” Cas asks, rubbing his thumb against the tepid condensation on the side of the beer bottle and forcing himself to tune back in to what Dean has been saying. 

“I just don’t think it’s necessary that we’re the ones to check out what sounds like a run of the mill haunting. Look it’s not that…” Dean stops himself with an impatient noise, rolling his eyes. “God. Do you ever get sick of hearing yourself talk?” 

“No,” Castiel replies flatly. It’s not that Cas doesn’t know what Dean’s trying to say, because he _does_ , because he knows Dean, better than he knows himself he sometimes thinks, but also Dean _has_ kind of been talking in circles for a while now and Cas is just waiting for him to get to the real point of the conversation, beyond his reluctance to take on a new hunt. 

“I want another beer, do you want another beer?” Dean asks, abruptly standing, ignoring the question. _Deflecting_ , Cas thinks. Another human trait he has unfortunately picked up himself. 

“Dean,” Cas says, gently stopping Dean from leaving by curling two fingers around Dean’s wrist. 

“You ever wonder what’d be like if we just...stopped?” Dean asks. He’s staring into the distance of the room, eyes unfocused as if seeing something that’s not there. 

“Stopped what?” Castiel asks. 

“All of it. The hunting, the fighting, the wars, the death,” Dean says. He finally looks down to where Cas is holding on to him and sits back down with a sigh. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?” 

“Angels don’t…” 

“Get tired, yeah whatever,” Dean finishes automatically, sighing again. He tugs at his wrist, rubbing at it with his other hand when Cas lets it go even though he’d barely put any pressure on it. “I always assumed I’d just be a hunter until I died. And then I did die. Like, a lot. And every year the shit we’re fighting escalates. Like some kind of fucked up video game. But have you ever thought about what would happen if we just opted out?” 

“I mean, the end of the world might happen,” Cas says, half heartedly attempting a joking tone. 

“But what do you think came first? The superhero or the supervillain? Do we keep having to save the world because it’s going to end? Or does it keep almost ending _because_? we’re there to stop it?” Dean asks. 

“You’re not making any sense, Dean,” Cas says. 

“Life doesn’t make sense, Cas,” Dean says, rolling his eyes although Cas has seen this affect enough times to read it as fond. “I guess what I’m asking is, if you _could_ stop all this. Stop with the pissing matches between Heaven and Hell. Stop fighting. Would you?” 

“I don’t know,” Cas admits, forcing himself to be honest. He’s had to reevaluate everything in his existence, since he pulled Dean from Hell and became immersed in the human experience, but he mostly hasn’t thought about any sort of existence outside of their cause. Even when he began to fight for himself, to fight for those he cared for rather than for Heaven’s orders, he saw no life outside those battles, aside from their brief respites, like this moment here. 

“I don’t think Sam wants to stop,” Dean says. “It’s weird, right. He was always the one who wanted a normal life and now it’s like, he’s just accepted all of this. And I’m the one daydreaming about a cabin in the woods with a dog and a garden. Much as I loved him I used to think Bobby was kind of a reclusive nut and now I think he had the right idea. But we saw how that turned out. Maybe people like us don’t get to retire. Or maybe it’s not people like us, it’s just us and the poison we bring to everything we touch.” 

“Dean, you’ve saved the world multiple times,” Cas reminds him. “You have saved countless lives.” 

“At what cost?” Dean asks, a brief, bitter smile crossing his face. “Do you think you’re better off since meeting us?” 

“Yes,” Cas replies instantly. “Of course I do. Dean, there are things I’ve done that I regret. Things I might change if I had the chance, and things I’ve been trying to atone for since, but I don’t regret meeting you. Or any part of humanity.” 

“Okay,” Dean says finally, and the look in his eyes say he accepts it, the warm glow of his soul says he trusts that Castiel is being honest with him. 

“Okay,” Cas echoes. 

“I guess…” Dean starts before pausing. “I guess I’ve just been wondering lately about the choices we make. And if we keep fighting if it’s really a choice at all, or if by choosing that life we’re still just buying in to that preordained violent bullshit.” 

“I wish I knew,” Cas answers after a moment, thinking it over. He thinks Dean deserves an honest response, after everything they’ve been through together. “I wish I knew what path we could take that would just be ours, not manipulated by anyone or anything else. But I don’t know anymore than you do, at this point. I think we just have to trust our instincts and try to do what’s right for us, what’s right for the people around us.” 

“Sometimes I think I liked you better when you were just another angelic robot,” Dean says, but he tempers his words with a soft look and a gentle squeeze of Cas’ shoulder. “I’ll grab us another beer.” 

Cas watches him walk away, trying to put his thoughts in order. Something he’d never had to do when he was an ‘angelic robot’ as Dean put it. 

It is not in the nature of angels to just...stop, as Dean puts it. Angels didn’t take vacations, they took orders. They surveilled, they followed, they fought, they even died, but they didn’t have their own lives to live, not in the same way that humans generally did. Then again Castiel’s time on Earth has become filled with things angels did not do. But even so, he struggles to imagine an existence where he and Dean and the other humans in their orbit did not fight to protect others. Dean deserves it, he thinks. To rest, to recover, to enjoy a simple human life. He is less sure about how long Dean could keep that up. Evil, as they have seen, never takes a break. There will always be another threat, and Dean has always felt the weight of responsibility for human life whether he knew them or not. 

And yet they are not the first warriors in history to save the world, to fight for others, to sacrifice until they were barely husks of themselves in order to change things for the better. At what point, Castiel wonders, will they have made up for the wrongs they’ve caused the world, at what point could they lay down their weapons without guilt, if ever. 

The world is still full of shadows, and Cas feels them pulling at him, even as he lets himself waste a little time in a warm kitchen with a human that history will eventually forget. Heaven could never recreate this feeling, this warmth, this burning righteous human feeling of domesticity and content. 

Maybe in some small way they have already _stopped_ as Dean put it, in these tiny human day to day actions that have become so infused in Castiel’s existence. He takes the fresh beer bottle from Dean as he returns, sitting in comfortable silence together as they each think on their histories and their future. Cas lets his wings shift slightly, and Dean glances at him, catching only a brief glimpse of his true form before he tucks it away between dimensions. 

“I’m in,” Cas says, finally. 

“In?” Dean says. 

“Whatever stand we take, whether it’s in rebellion against Heaven or Hell. Whether we forsake this fight completely and let ourselves rejoin humanity as it stands,” Cas says. “We do it of our own free will and we do it together. No matter what we choose, no matter what they think, it is _our_ choice.” 

“Yeah,” Dean says faintly. “Our choice. Even if it’s the wrong one, right?” 

“Especially if it’s the wrong one,” Cas replies with shrug, thinking back on all of their mistakes and how they lead them here. 

“To making our own choices,” Dean says, clinking his bottle of beer against Cas’. 

“To making our own mistakes,” Cas replies. 

He can feel the Earth turning beneath their feet, and he can feel Heaven shifting and growing above them, and yet here on Earth in an ill fitting vessel, in a cramped and cluttered room with an uncouth human Cas thinks he has never been more himself. He feels his true for shift and whirr beneath his vessel but it feels complete, feels _right_. 

Despite the strange journey to get here, despite Fate working against them, Cas thinks _this_ is where he’s supposed to be. At long last, this is where he is supposed to be.


End file.
